Northern Rock was a product of Britain’s overheated housing bubble. Formed in the 1960s through amalgamation of two nineteenth-century building societies (thrifts) and headquartered in gritty Newcastle, it had by the 1990s acquired fifty-three competitors across the north of England. To create the platform for further growth in October 1997, it converted from thrift status to a public limited company and floated on the London Stock Exchange. Then, between 1998 and 2007, in a gigantic surge of growth, it quintupled its balance sheet. As house prices faltered, some of its more marginal loans
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